“My own view is the hunting ban is a bad piece of legislation, it hasn’t worked, it has made a mockery of the law, a lot of time was wasted on it, and I think we would be better off without it. That gives you a clue to how I will vote.

Using the same logic as Louise, David Cameron doesn’t give a shit about animal cruelty. After all, if it’s alright to rip a fox to bits using dogs, which is undeniably cruel, then why is it wrong to kick the face off a dog, or to throw a cat in the river with only a couple of bricks for company in a bag or to make lame a horse with a blade in the middle of the night. Presumably by the logic that Louise forwards, the RSPCA should be a proscribed organisation.

The ban on fox hunting may be a poor piece of legislation, but that is no reason to repeal it, modify it instead. The Tories claim that they don’t like animal cruelty, who would claim otherwise? Are they going to ban battery farming or the use of animals in cosmetics manufacturing?

The Tories today promised to give £1m of taxpayers’ money as a cash prize to the person or team who manages to “harness the wisdom of the crowd” by producing an online platform to solve “common problems”.

The winning product must deliver an effective and available site for the public to post their ideas on, as well as a truly beneficial outcome for it to be worthy of the £1m payout, which the party says would be the biggest prize offered by a British government in the modern era.

WTF?

Ideas “to get the ball rolling” suggested by the Tories include: identifying and rooting out wasteful government spending, designing credit card bills that anyone can understand; rating the quality of schools and hospitals; making government information clear and simple; and – they say – picking the England squad for the 2010 World Cup.

So, the Tories think that there is no one in Whitehall that can go around the place and ask people “Why are you doing that?”, that there is no one in the whole of the fucking banking business that can draw up a simple way of billing people if they really had to? They think that we believe that they will take on a way of rating schools and hospitals that a government can’t fiddle to make themselves look better?
As far as clear, simple government information is concerned, the information given out usually looks like there is a deliberate effort to make it unfathomable so a £1m prize for making it clearer is gonna be easy money.

OUTRAGED travellers demanded last night that Transport Secretary Lord Adonis return from holiday to tackle the UK’s travel nightmare.
The Cabinet minister had sloped off to a luxury Alpine skiing holiday in Austria while Britons slid and shivered on roads, railways and airport floors.

The above piece isn’t exactly a lie, which is why I’m posting here rather than at The Sun Lies, except that maybe travellers, although outraged, aren’t demanding Lord Adonis cut short his christmas holiday, as most probably didn’t even realise he was on holiday. The reader doesn’t find out, no travellers are quoted in the article, only bods from organisations and the like.

What has pee’d me off about this article is the way that the Sun starts off screaming about Lord Adonis ‘sloping’* off for a ski holiday while the country grinds to a halt.

*From the Suns’ position, that is a fantastic pun. Not only does it fit with Adonis going on the piste**, but it aslo goes with the sneaky, useless Labour government narrative.

**apologies for that one.

The next paragraph carries on the narrative by introducing the bumbling sidekick…

Lord Adonis, 46, left his hapless deputy Sadiq Khan to face the avalanche of fury over cancellations, delays and the road gritting shambles.

That’s the groundwork for the piece laid down: the boss has snuk (sneaked?) off and left his bumbling deputy to cope.
Naturally the shadow local government minister is gonna have pop and say that Adonis should come back, via airports that are closed, to help out with a shovel and a bag of grit.

Once all that is set up there follows a great long list of things that have happened because of the cold, as if it’s Lord Adonis’ fault:

Nine people have died during the cold snap as temperatures plunged to as low as -16C in some parts of the UK.

Two women were killed and almost 50 injured when a coach overturned on icy roads in Cornwall late last night.

In Northamptonshire Paul Litchfield, 30, and Philip Sturridge, 42, drowned as they tried to rescue their pet Labrador from a frozen lake near Ringstead.

Adonis should’ve been handing out thermal underwear, and called the bus company to tell them not to send the driver out and gone onto the frozen lake himself instead of making those two chaps go out on the thin ice themselves to rescue a fucking dog.

In Sale, Greater Manchester, recovery worker Denis Livesly, 60, was killed as he attended to a car in a snowstorm on the M60 motorway.

Malcolm Brown, 32, was also killed in Basingstoke, Hampshire, when a deer smashed through his windscreen during a blizzard.

On the island of Lewis 35-year-old electrician Donald Martin froze to death after locking himself out of his home after a Christmas party.

How could Adonis have prevented Mr Livesly from dying? Deers are a nightmare whatever the weather, is it Adonis’ fault Donald Martin didn’t have the sense to smash a window to get back in his home?

There’s more stories about people trying to save their dogs and people dying after slipping on ice and aeroplanes slipping off the end of runways and trains and the Royal Mail and Asda and Eurostar and roads and… and… and…

If only Lord Adonis was here. The country would be able to stop being so shit at bad weather.

In elections these days, all major candidates have a huge team of volunteers behind them, helping them produce and distribute leaflets, get publicity in the local news media, raising their profile and painting a generally rosy picture of them.

But the public gets no such help. They are given election leaflets, party election broadcasts, newspaper interviews with candidates, but they are not given solid, factual information, or simple unbiased analysis of the truth value of these publicity campaigns, especially not at a local level.

We feel that the public needs its own team of volunteers to help them. We want you to be one of those volunteers: gather information on candidates, their leaflets, and local news coverage of them; or publicise vote analyses in local papers around the country; or do other tasks we haven’t even thought of yet.

With your help, we can give the public the same support that the candidates already get.

Lets all give a big ‘ah’. Those horrible nasty leftie communist conspiracy loving traitors have made the BNP close it’s freepost address. From now on if you want to send the racist fucks anything you’ll have to pay for it yourself.

Please be aware that our FREEPOST address is no longer operational due to sustained abuse and illegal activity from our political opponents.

This matter is currently under police investigation and until further notice we would request that you use the following postal address instead;

Shame on you all. It’s not big and it not clever, but it was, apparently, expensive.

The politicians have made a feeble attempt to save face in Copenhagen and hammered out a deal which by all accounts is not legally binding and falls far short of what is actually needed. Despite all the talk earlier on in the conference about this being the last chance for humanity to do something meaningful, the rich nations are simply not capable of taking responsibility for the climate situation that has overwhelmingly been caused by them. This quote from the Greenpeace UK executive director John Sauven just about hits the nail on the head:

“It seems there are too few politicians in this world capable of looking beyond the horizon of their own narrow self-interest, let alone caring much for the millions of people who are facing down the threat of climate change,” he said.

“It is now evident that beating global warming will require a radically different model of politics than the one on display here in Copenhagen.”

I can’t express my disappointment and contempt for out inept leaders as succinctly as Mr Sauven, so for the time being I won’t – more to follow later.

I got a new post up at Mailwatch. Some cunt thinks smoking is good and that smokers do the NHS a favour by dropping down dead prematurely, which obviously all smokers do, except the ones that die a protracted painful death over many years of course.

I didn’t even go into the nightmare that was the comments underneath it.

[Claimant] In September 2009, a joint statement was agreed and issued by Trafigura and the solicitors representing around 30,000 Ivorian claimants who had brought personal injury proceedings in the English High Court. The statement (which was endorsed by Mr Justice MacDuff, the Judge who had been due to hear the trial, as “100% truthful”) recorded that the experts instructed in that case had been unable to identify any link between exposure to the slops and the deaths, miscarriages and chronic and long-term injuries alleged.

Following Trafigura’s complaint over Newsnight’s story, the BBC carried out a detailed further review of the available evidence and of Trafigura’s detailed response in its Reply in these proceedings. The BBC accepts the conclusions reached by the experts in the personal injury action and reflected in the Reply. The BBC therefore acknowledges that the evidence does not establish that Trafigura’s “slops” caused any deaths, miscarriages or serious or long-term injuries. Accordingly, the BBC has withdrawn those allegations and has agreed to broadcast an appropriate apology on Newsnight, to join in the making of this Statement in Open Court, and to publish the Statement on its website.

Defendant

My Lord, on behalf of the BBC I accept everything my friend has said. The BBC withdraws the allegation that deaths, miscarriages or serious or long-term injuries were caused by the waste and apologises to Trafigura for having claimed otherwise.

The BBC hopes that by the joining in the making of this Statement it will assist in setting the record straight.

The pre publication test case for libel the famous Groucho Club instigated against award winning filmmaker and writer Tyrone D Murphy is now at an end

The Groucho club, after nearly a year has issued discontinuance notice just a week before a case management conference was to take place where an order time for standard disclosure would have been made

The notice was issued shortly after a witness came forward. The statement was lodged with another Court in Wales in relation to a Data Protection Act case that Tyrone D Murphy issued against the Groucho Club

The witness who was a manager from the Groucho Club had just left his employment at the Club recently. His detailed statement not only refutes the Groucho Club statement of case but is a detailed statement of the events at the Groucho Club over a five year period.

The case now being at an end, no deal was done or no deal will be done. The book “The Groucho Gate Affair” is going ahead.